* * *

The Research Roundtable on Law and the Allocation of Risk explored the challenges of managing and allocating risk within legal frameworks, particularly focusing on the tension between compensating victims and deterring harmful behavior. This tension is well-known in the insurance context as the ‘insurance-deterrence tradeoff,’ but it extends across various areas of law and risk management. As risk landscapes evolve, legal systems face increasing complexity in balancing these objectives, requiring innovative approaches to risk management and allocation.

This Roundtable was designed and facilitated by Erin Meyers Matsick, Assistant Professor of Law at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School.

Key Questions:

• How can risk management strategies address scenarios where full compensation undermines deterrence, or where optimal deterrence fails to provide adequate redress?
• In risk allocation, when should compensation or deterrence take precedence?
• How are emerging risks reshaping traditional approaches to legal risk management?

A non-exhaustive list of potential topics that papers pursued includes:

1. Insurance and Risk Allocation

• Impact of risk-spreading mechanisms on harm prevention incentives
• Insurance companies as risk managers and de facto private regulators
• Moral hazard in intentional torts and lack of compensation for victims

2. Public Sector Risk Management

• Risk of underdeterrence in the context of sovereign and qualified immunity
• Tensions in compensating victims with public funds
• Risk sharing and accountability in public-private partnerships

3. Behavioral Barriers to Optimal Deterrence and Compensation

• The role of bounded rationality in risk-taking behavior of potential defendants and victims
• Public perceptions of risk in the face of evolving sources of news media

4. Catastrophic Risk

• Legal responses to rare, high-impact events that challenge conventional cost-benefit frameworks

5. Climate Risk and Property Insurance

• Climate-driven insurance crises and their effect on land use and risk-taking
• Risk allocation between government, insurers, and property owners
• Potential future government subsidies in homeowners insurance

6. Quantifying Non-Monetary Harms

• Identifying contexts in which the legal system may systematically overvalue or undervalue intangible harms
• Impact of damage caps on risk allocation

These and other topics that expert applicants identify as worthy of analysis were considered. Authors were encouraged to explain where their research fills gaps in the existing research and literature.

1. Submission of Research Proposal – Submission Deadline of July 14, 2025

2. Research Roundtable, (October 9 – 11, 2025):

• Selected authors presented well-developed drafts of their papers at a private research roundtable. This research roundtable was designed to provide authors with constructive feedback from expert academics and practitioners in the field. In addition to the paper, authors were expected to serve as commentators on all papers. The research roundtable provided at least one additional commentator per paper who joined the roundtable. This peer review process ensured every draft paper underwent significant scrutiny and received substantial feedback for improvement. Research roundtable drafts represented substantial work beyond the proposal,  suitable for presentation at a faculty workshop. Authors chosen to present were provided an honorarium of $4,000 per paper after timely submission of their draft and presentation of their work at the October roundtable.

3. Completion of Final Draft, Submission to a Suitable Academic Journal, and Posting to SSRN (January 31, 2026):

• As a condition of receiving final payment, authors must complete the final draft of their Roundtable paper and seek publication in a suitable academic journal. If submitting to peer-reviewed journals, the deadline is January 1, 2026; if submitting to the general law review pool, the deadline is February 1, 2026. Authors are expected to post their final paper to SSRN by February 2, 2026. The LEC will also host these drafts on its website (http://masonlec.org).

In addition to providing honoraria, the LEC provided lodging and group meals at the Research Roundtable. Participants were responsible for their own transportation arrangements and expenses.

For questions about the Roundtable, please contact Gwendolyn Watson at [email protected].

* * *

The LEC’s Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies promotes law and economics scholarship by funding faculty research, convening research roundtables, and hosting policy-relevant academic workshops and conferences.

Established in 2010 to honor the legacy of Henry G. Manne – legendary former Dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School, founder of the Law & Economics Center, and one of the founding fathers of the law and economics movement – the program seeks to improve the quality of legal scholarship by offering educational workshops on important and topical areas of study.

Since its founding, the Manne Program’s workshops and research roundtables have included more than 2,000 participants from 429 academic institutions. In addition to its core constituency of academics, Manne Program programs also attract attendance from the policy community, including economists and lawyers from federal agencies, Capitol Hill, state government offices, and the non-profit and for-profit research sectors.